Up Front: At Hohm with Microsoft's power management, and Facebook's privacy push

Hohm, Hohm for your range (and your fridge and your laptops and all)

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 • Sometimes it's good to live in Seattle -- like when Microsoft announces its Hohm power-management beta and both your utility companies are part of the team. The announcement was accompanied by all the Web 2.0 trimmings -- the signup page, yes, and also the Twitter account and the blog and the Facebook page and -- say, a person starts to wonder how much power all this is taking to do.

Elsewhere, Preston Koerner at Jetson Green put together a nice overview with screen captures. Ina Fried at CNET got Craig Mundie on camera to talk about Microsoft's interest in energy monitoring tech. And Technologizer's Harry McCracken does a nice job of summarizing how this compares to Google's PowerMeter project.

Facebook pushes privacy control upgrades into beta

Beginning June 24 • A few Facebook users (not this one) gained access to the service's new, more granular privacy controls, which can be applied even to individual posts. (Someone tell those AP staffers from yesterday's WN|WN!) Olaoluwa Okelola lays it all out, including an explanation of who's beta-eligible righ tnow, in a blog post on the site.

Nick O'Neill at All Facebook likes what he saw. At Mashable, Jennifer Van Grove thinks it's most interesting as likely groundwork for the rollout of Facebook Search.

US government makes dismay over Green Dam official

June 24, 2009 • If there was any question before about whether the US had filed an official complaint about Green Dam, the filtering software the Chinese government decrees must be installed on all PCs sold there after July 1, it's settled now. The BBC reports that the US has officially called on China to scrap its plans -- and that the call is part of a pattern of growing trade stresses between the two countries.

Kim Hart at the Washington Post has details on the letters US Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke sent to the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Ministry of Commerce. Both letters state that the requirement that the filter be installed may be a violation of certain World Trade Organization agreements the country has made. So that's DC with skin in the game; David Callahan at MarketWatch would like to know why Silicon Valley hasn't likewise stepped up. Gary Shapiro, the president of the Consumer Electronics Association, has -- he's got a Huffington Post guest editorial on why Green Dam endangers both human rights and American technology.

Google ninjas: Learn their skills, Grasshopper

You'll never know, because they're ninjas • Your reporter noted with amusement Wednesday evening the "New! Gmail tips" link at the top of our Gmail page, but I was stunned to discover that even though I get several hundred e-mails a day, have used Gmail daily since very, very early in the service's never-ending beta period, and monitor the new Labs offerings as a matter of course, I have but the skills of a black-belt user -- not the enlightened Gmail Master I would have thought. In other words, the cheerful little guides are worth looking at even if you think you know all the productivity tricks.

Palm earnings call...Think the Pre will be mentioned?

June 25, 2009, 2:00 pm PDT > Your reporter just might listen to the Palm earnings call on her Palm Pre. (Not really. They have webcasts for that sort of thing.) Analysts expect the company to announce $115 in revenue and a loss of 62 cents/share during the recently ended fourth quarter, also known as the hurry up already with the new phone! period. We'll be listening for whatever sales numbers they care to taunt us with (RBC Capital's Mike Abramsky estimates 150,000 sold so far, with stores selling out of all the stock they get) -- and for confirmation of those rumors of a $99 Pre by year's end.

FCC stuck at square one on nationwide broadband

July 2, 2009, 10:00 am EDT > The Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to hold a regular open hearing, one subject of which will be the debate over creating something called a "National Broadband Plan" for the US. The objective will be to determine new regulatory standards for ensuring affordability and full access to consumers, especially in rural areas where coverage is spotty and more difficult.

But what regulators need to determine just how spotty that coverage is, is data. Last week, the Senate Commerce Committee blasted both the FCC and the Government Accountability Office for either not taking the opportunity to gather data on precisely which Americans have broadband access and where, or utilizing random polling (in the GAO's case) to sample a few rural customers here and there around the nation. Senators called on the FCC to implement a new data-gathering procedure to determine what real rural access levels are, and Acting Chairman Michael Copps immediately agreed.

You'd think that would be the end of it, or at least the start of something good; but now, a major debate has begun over the question of who the FCC should be asking. Last June 8, the United States Telecom Association (USTelecom) -- representing the US' largest broadband providers -- formally urged the Commission to begin polling many classes of customers across the nation, including in deep rural areas. As the group's president and CEO, Walter McCormick, stated at the time, "If we truly want to reach everyone with these opportunities, then we must face head-on issues like technology literacy, computer ownership and perceived lack of relevance."

But in a formal response filed yesterday, another group representing smaller broadband carriers that service more rural areas exclusively, argued that polling businesses, hospitals, schools, and farms may be "punitive and irrelevant" for those entities. Instead, the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association is urging the FCC to poll the carriers, since they know who and where their customers are, and then use mathematics to determine who isn't being served by them and where.

In so doing, the NCTA states, the FCC might learn that some of these larger "price-cap" carriers (those whose terms of service are already regulated by the FCC due to their size) are the only service providers in their respective regions, perhaps imposing terms on their exclusive rural customers that make it difficult or impossible for them to switch carriers to smaller brands once those brands finally build out into those regions. "It is crucial to ensure that high-capacity broadband facilities are available at reasonable prices, terms, and conditions," stated NCTA Vice President Daniel Mitchell yesterday, "particularly from the largest price-cap carriers that dominate the special access market."

Thursday's tech headlines

Technology Review

• The $100 OLPC laptop -- more specifically, its Sugar interface -- is now available in USB thumb-drive form for just a few dollars. Of course they'd call it Sugar on a Stick.

• This issue's Briefing feature covers cloud computing. If you secretly feel you're a little behind the curve on the topic, this is the set of articles you've been waiting for.

• Stanford researchers are working on a suite of tools that should make building data visualizations much, much easier. Protovis, which is now under the wing of the Mozilla Foundation, should be coming soon to a version of Thunderbird near you.

Ars Technica

• Lunar eclipses happen twice a year, but the Eclipse project's big coordinated release event happens but once. There's Galileo, a new version of the development environment, and 33 (!) related projects.

• A German court has won a judgment against RapidShare, requiring that it put "proactive" content filtering in place to block illegal sharing of albums.

• Richard Marx, whose "Now and Forever" was one of the 24 songs for which Jammie Thomas-Rasset got nailed, has issued a statement about the case -- condemning the RIAA. (He was disgusted by the industry back in the "Don't Mean Nothing" era, and he's disgusted now. Consistent!)

Los Angeles Times

• They're not the first guys to wonder whether Apple's concealment of Steve Jobs' true health situation fell on the wrong side of the disclosure laws, but David Sarno and Walter Hamilton  have a good analysis of the overlapping privacy, securities, and public relations issues.

Mashable

• YouTube's new channel design looks fantastic, and starting right now all new users will see it rather than the older, less organized version. No word from Ben Parr on when the oldtimers will be thus indulged.

• A European furniture maker -- or the PR firm working for them, anyway -- thought it would get more Twitter signups for its customer database by attaching popular hashtags to their little ads. That included tags used last week by people attempting to keep track of the situation in Iran. Tacky.

TechCrunch

• Jason Kincaid spotted the new City Tours item on the Google labs roster yesterday and spent some time playing with the rough-and-ready travel-itinerary tool.

• Freelance? Looking? Roi Carthy checks out DoNanza, which scrapes hundreds of sites to gather all the gigs it can find. Web developers, programmers, and SEO guys will be interested in this one.

• Seriously, Shaq found out he'd been traded to the Cavs via Twitter? I don't know if I believe that, but then against I can't believe the big man's headed to Cleveland in the first place. It's all just so wrong.